Bounce rate : 4 sure-fire ways to improve it

The bounce rate of a website is a metric that displays the amount of visitors that entered your site, viewed only one page and then left. In basic terms, its a representation of how many people didnt find what they were looking for on your site. Your bounce rate is directly linked to a number of aspects of your website and as an online marketing professional, I come across a number of websites with bounce rates ranging from 1% to around 77%. And yes, it is possible to have a website with such a low bounce rate. Follow the below steps to not only improve your bounce rate, but to also improve the overall quality of your website.

Copy

You’ve heard this before but copy is king. As cliche as that statement is, its true. Your copy needs to highlight valuable points of interest to your visitor. If the copy is rubbish or spammy, the visitor will leave. Although most of your visitors wont spend too much time reading your content, making the important points bold and in some cases underlined will definitely catch the visitors attention and give them a clear understanding of what you are trying to portray. If you are using WordPress for your website, making use of Talooma’s Copy Compass plugin will help streamline and optimise your copy.

Site Design

Site design can have a massive impact on your bounce rate. Personally, if I’m searching for something and land up on a website that looks like it was built in the Roman era, I leave almost immediately without even reading the copy on the page. Ensure your site design is modern, easy on the eyes and displays information neatly without any advertisements (especially the page on which you are trying to convert users into sales or leads).

Call to actions

A call to action is a phrase, image or link that directs visitors to act in the manner you would want. Many websites fall short on catchy call to actions and therefore leave the visitor either trying to find the link that gets them to the next level, or leaves them in the dark as what to do next. This can have a drastic impact on your bounce rate. Take a look at some of these CTA’s to get some idea’s for your site.

Basic Landing Page Optimisation
Testing different variations of certain key elements on your page may be a good way to identify problem areas on your site. For example, your header tag of your page may be throwing people off. Running the same page with different variations of these key elements is not a difficult task. I suggest making use of Google’s Website Optimiser tool to run these experiments.

In short the bounce rate of your website is one of the more crucial or critical metrics to keep an eye on. But do not only pay attention to bounce rates in isolation as certain pages especially well optimised pages (with call to actions that don’t lead away from the page) will have an acceptably high bounce rate.